Finding Clients Can Be A Challenge When Starting Out. Here Are Four Ways To Find Them

If you decide to flee 9 to 5 world and to live by your wits as well your laptop as a independent copywriter, the largest challenge you will face is finding clients. It can take months, if not a number of years, to build up a secure customer base to keep your profits at a stable level. So you need to make sure you have sufficient funds to last half a year before you get started and that you never stop advertising and marketing yourself and looking for clients.

Here are four ways of locating corporations able to pay for your copywriting expertise:

Social networking sites

LinkedIn is the alternative to Facebook for business professionals. Rather than party photos, Farmville and posting witty jokes, people use LinkedIn as a professional networking tool to link with people they’ve worked with and people they’d like to. So it's a wise decision to get involved by setting up a user profile and interacting with colleagues you've worked with before and people you want to work with in the foreseeable future.

To give your network a jump start, send link invitations to all the people you've worked with in the past. You may be surprised what businesses they may have transferred to that might make use of a copywriter. You may also use LinkedIn to find enterprises in your local area that might call for your services and whom you can contact for freelance assignments.

Marketing and webdesign agencies always need freelancers

Local marketing and website design agencies can be a goldmine of freelance copywriting work paid at a good rate of pay.. They will also give you access to bigger higher paying clients and brands than you would be in the position to connect with as an individual freelancer. The big agencies probably already have copywriters internally, so it will be sensible to concentrate on the medium sized to smaller agencies who use freelancers to add extra expertise whenever they require them.

Attending face to face business networking functions

With competition for clients on the web leading to rates of pay to drop fast, the best method is to seek out customers in your local region. Folks naturally prefer to work work those they've met in person. With this in mind, you need to be out there shaking hands and speaking to local business owners, face to face, at each chance you get.

If you check with your local council or business support organisations you will likely discover a vibrant business networking scene in your town. Often held in local hotel function rooms or over an early morning breakfast in a local restaurant, networking events are typically fairly relaxed and enable people who run businesses and freelancers to meet each other.

While many business networking events have to be paid for, it’s often feasible to locate free events in your neighborhood. But if you can not locate any professional networking events in your town or city, then why not start an event of your own? You could create the event on a social networking website, like Meetup, Facebook or LinkedIn. Simply start a networking get together and next invite people in your neighborhood business community to attend also to invite their business contacts.

Pick up the phone

Many copywriters are naturally fearful of picking up the phone, and would rather clean the house than pick-up the phone. It can be time-consuming, but contacting local firms which may require a freelance copywriter is far more effective than just email bombing them. Sending unsolicited email messages is unlikely going to get the result you need, unless you want to irritate people and be labelled a spammer. Making the effort to pick up the phone, on the other hand, gives you the chance to speak about your copywriting expertise in a more ethical way that can build a relationship and give you the opportunity of acquiring some freelance work.

As a freelancer you can not afford to sit back and wait for enquries to roll in. So you need to be constantly marketing and offering your copywriting skills so you can build up a consistent salary and make the freelance dream a reality.

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What's Your SEO Plan In 2013?

Everybody would like to be ranked number one in Google. But claiming top spot has always been far from easy. For a long time internet marketers have played a game of cat and mouse with the internet's most widely used search engine. Whether it was link pyramids, stuffing keywords, or using bots to build links with a huge number of sites at the press of a button, they had all sorts of techniques for tricking Google into awarding them page one.

However recently Google is making great progress in not only beating these techniques but also punishing internet marketers that have used them. Its Panda and Penguin updates may have soft and cuddly titles. But the problems they have unleashed onto the rankings, and earnings, of 1000s of online marketers have led to many giving up the battle entirely.

A lot of affiliate marketers continue to use automated software and junk content to infest the online world with links to their websites. But there is a big question mark over how much longer these techniques will work. Ultimately, it’s only a matter of time before Google wins the war, and affiliate marketers bow their heads in acceptance to the new rules of SEO.

<h3>the five pillars of seo </h3>

Google would prefer you not to do any optimisation at all. If you do anything to cheat you can look forward to getting a 'Google slap' in the next algorithm update. Instead, looking natural is the name of the game. How can this be done? Through your content. This is why a copywriter should now be on your speed dial for search engine optimisation services.

These are the new 5 pillars of SEO:

Social Media Links- What other people think has always been a strong measure of what is the best content available on a topic. So Google has started using Facebook Likes, Tweets and other social media signals to gauge which articles and blog posts deserve to be promoted. And how do you think you can garner all these Likes and Tweets? That’s right, through employing a copywriter to write great content for you. These days it’s possible to get just as much traffic from social media as it is from the search engines. One day social media’s influence may grow to the stage where you dont even have to worry about SEO.

Aim For A Wider Range Of Keywords - Not long ago the main SEO advice was to use keywords in your 'anchor text. Unwittingly, this led to website owners committing the sin of ‘over optimising’ and only using the same few high traffic keywords in their links. Instead, you need to have a assortment of anchor text to reflect the many ways in which people enter links to sites. Rather than just having ‘snow plough’ as your link in every syndicated blog post and article, you need to include terms like 'visit our snow plough website', 'we sell the best snow ploughs‘ and more varied anchor text that reflects the different ways people link on the web.

Bounce Rate - Much like a rubber ball bouncing against a wall, this is the number of visitors who abandon your site without visiting more than one page. This means the longer people stay engaged with your articles the more respect you’ll get from the Big G. So to improve your rankings, you need excellent content that keeps them engaged, answers their questions and keeps them hanging around for longer. $5 articles you can buy off freelance bidding sites are unlikely to achieve this.

Guest Blogging - Backlinks from relevant, high quality websites has always been SEO mana. The only problem is that now everyone is trying to guest post. As a result, they will be less than impressed if you send them rehashed content, reheated and handed over as original thought. Instead, blog owners want articles that challenges their reader’s preconceptions or has something new to say. Providing this content takes research and time to assemble such high quality, original guest articles.

Google+ Author Link - Google+ might still be lagging behind its rivals, but Google+ is becoming important to your SEO strategy. If you havent already, you need to start notching up members to your Google+ Circles because it gives Google a clear indication that you have something interesting to say. You also need to add the Google+ authorship link to your website because it lets Google know you write stuff that people read and that you deserve a high ranking in its search rankings.

So the message is clear. If you want to boost your rankings in Google you need to get talking to content producers and/or copywriters. Another benefit you will gain is that along with higher rankings, you will be improving your reputation as a thought leader and an expert on the internet. This of course means that higher website visitors and more enquiries on your website will arise .

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Writing For A Wage From A Home OfficeCan Be Bliss For Some But A Nightmare For Others

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is usually a challenge - I should know because I began my freelance copy writing business from scratch!} Normally it takes months, if not years, to grow your client list as well as be making a well balanced income.

But when you manage it, it can be a rewarding lifestyle, both in terms of work/life benefits along with income. However, as with all career, there are disadvantages of the self-employed way of life you need to consider.

REASONS WHY YOU MIGHT NOT DESIRE TO BECOME A INDEPENDENT COPY WRITER

Loss of social connection - If you like spending some time exclusively by yourself (as many writers tend to do) then freelancing might be perfect for you. But if you enjoy connecting with fellow workers and customers then it may get lonely due to being on your own all the time.. This means you have to find other ways of getting out so you get some human interaction into the day).

The amount of competition that can drive prices down - In my experience, the most financially rewarding supply of clients is people who live in your local area. They'll be happy to pay a good rate to work with an individual they can look in the eye and meet directly.. I always encourage marketing wherever possiblein your local area to discover clients. However there are always businesses where charges are the deciding issue. They are more likely to visit the web to find a copywriter.. On the net your competition is practically unlimited, due to the reach of the internet and since anyone canmake a websitealong with say they are a copywriter.

Changing salary - When starting out, I propose having enough funds to last you six months while you find clients. Even then retaining a reliable income can be a struggle. There will be occasions when the emails never cease flowing and the mobile phone is off hook. Other times you may be staring at your PC nervously awaiting those enquiries to reach. You have to be ready for a fluctuating income in order to be a self-employed copywriter, and the stress that can come with it because the business running expenses don’t stop when your income does.

THE ADVANTAGES OF BEING A INDEPENDENT COPY WRITER

Earning money to write - If you like writing then getting paid to do it will sound like paradise. As afreelance copywriter you will spend your days studying interesting new topics and then writing about them in a manner that aims to be engaging along with persuasive.

Broaden your know-how - To start with you will likely be a generalist, which means you will probably be writing about a variety of products and topics. You may be writing for all manner of businesses on all manner of topics. You could be writing about custom built metal furnishings in the morning hours and high-tech computer software in the evening. So if learning about fresh topics interests you, learning to be a freelance copywriter might be right up your street.

Work/life balance - As a freelancer doing work at home, you don’t have a supervisor telling you what to do. You're able to choose what assignments to work on, and you can also choose to go for a mid morning stroll if you like, and catch up later in the evening. Who would not love that independence? If you get stuck for inspiration at home you'll be able to go and work in coffee shops or the local library, turning your surrounding area into your office.

Income potential - It takes time to get established, but once you've grown your client base you can be prepared to get paid a fairly good amount for your writing. As a freelancer you are able to charge greater pay every hour compared to someone employed full-time. This means you can make a high annual income if you are able to establish a steady flow of work. Providing copywriting for businesses in order to promote their services and productscan be a stressful task. But with your writing ability linked to sales you can expect to make a six figure wage with practice and experience.

I hope, this article has given you an summary of the benefits and disadvantages of the freelance way of life. Good luck in making your step into freelance copywriting a success!